Pokemon Promo Shows Flying Pikachu Used to Have Wings

gamerant.com:

An early piece of promotional art for Pokemon seems to indicate that Flying Pikachu once had wings to propel it through the air. The art was originally featured in a promotional Pokemon giveaway where players could acquire either a Surfing Pikachu or a Flying Pikachu if they were lucky enough to win.

Flying Pikachu has had a presence across multiple video games as well as the Pokemon Trading Card Game, but players are likely familiar with it using balloons to fly, not wings. Pikachu isn't normally a Flying-type, but players have been able to get the balloon-wearing variant through things like giveaways or special spawns in Pokemon GO.

A giveaway originally featured in Japanese publication CoroCoro Comics and shared by Reddit user Collector55 shows a design of Flying Pikachu with a small pair of puffy wings on its back. The flyer was published to advertise a contest where a winner could acquire either a Flying Pikachu or a Surfing Pikachu. Readers who managed to win would need to mail in their Pokemon cartridges to receive the Pikachu variant. While a Flying Pikachu would be included in Pokemon Yellow's intro, shown being floated by balloons, this flyer may indicate that the developers at Game Freak initially had a different design in mind.

Pikachu going from having wings to a set of balloons might seem like a fairly large change to make, but Pokemon designs have shifted a number of times over the course of the franchise's history. Pikachu itself almost saw a drastically different design when Pokemon released in the west, as Nintendo of America reportedly wanted to change the Electric-type mouse Pokemon into something closer to a tiger with breasts. Even the protagonist of the Pokemon anime hasn't been the same over the course of the series, as Ash Ketchum has been redesigned in Pokemon movies and the TV series alike.

Without further clarification from Game Freak, it's impossible to say how early this Pikachu design was scrapped. It's also possible that it was a concept